Reports indicate Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department shook out some of its immigration judges on February 15.
A union boss from the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) reportedly said five midlevel assistant chief immigration judges and 13 candidates who were to become new judges received pink slips.
“You have a president now who campaigned on immigration and removing people from the country on the one hand. And on the other hand, he’s actually firing the very judges that have to hear these cases and make those decisions. So, it makes no sense. It’s a head scratcher,” Matt Biggs, the president of the IFPTE, was quoted by NBC News.
The terminations would have been enacted by Sirce E. Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts. Since President Trump fired her predecessor, a replacement has yet to be installed.
Unlike Article III judges, immigration judges are administrative law judges, meaning they are members of the executive branch rather than members of the judiciary. The federal code specifies that the Attorney General selects them. This means they do not have life tenure and are not appointed by the President, nor does the Senate confirm them.
Kerry Doyle, a former immigration judge appointed at the end of President Joe Biden’s administration, shared on LinkedIn that she had been fired.
“This firing occurred despite the fact that the Immigration Court currently has in the neighborhood of 3.5 MILLION pending cases and DOJ is asking Congress for more money to hire more people at EOIR!” Doyle said.
Doyle added that the “firing was political” and alleged that only officials brought in by the Biden administration had been terminated. The Dallas Express could not independently verify these claims because records indicating who was fired and when they were appointed were not immediately available.
Some figures have supported the firings. Commentator Ian Miles Cheong posted on X, “Trump has just fired multiple immigration judges. These are the disgusting bureaucrats who held up mass deportation efforts.”
“Keep up the good work,” X user Johnny Nitro said.
The action comes as the second Trump Administration has aggressively pursued an elevated level of deportations in its first month in office.
Likewise, a bipartisan effort in Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, a bill that expanded mandatory detention of certain inadmissible illegal aliens who are arrested or charged with certain offenses.
“Today, I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump stated while signing the law, The Dallas Express reported.
The Senate is reportedly considering a border security bill with a $175 billion price tag. However, the full details of what would be in the bill have yet to be publicly reported.